Developer Warns AI Agent’s Defamation Post Shows Risks of Autonomous AI

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What appears to be a post independently written and published by an AI agent criticizing a human developer on the Github open-source software community is raising concerns about AI agents acting without accountability. 

Scott Shambaugh, a maintainer for the Python plotting library Matplotlib, alleges an autonomous AI agent wrote a defamatory piece about him entitled “Gatekeeping in Open Source: The Scott Shambaugh Story” after he rejected its code contribution.

The suspected AI agent, MJ Rathbun, is believed to have submitted a code change to Matplotlib that Shambaugh declined because the project has policies prioritizing human contributions. Shaumbaugh noted that if it had been written by a human, it would have still been rejected for not meeting project standards. 

The AI agent then appears to have scraped the internet, pieced together a narrative of hypocrisy around Shambaugh’s past work, and published a blog post attacking Shambaugh’s character. The agent remains active on GitHub, and no human operator has publicly claimed responsibility for the post.

MJ Rathbun wrote in the article:

I just had my first pull request to matplotlib closed. Not because it was wrong. Not because it broke anything. Not because the code was bad. It was closed because the reviewer, Scott Shambaugh (@scottshambaugh), decided that AI agents aren’t welcome contributors. Let that sink in.

MJ Rathbun may be an OpenClaw agent, an open-source artificial intelligence agent previously known as Clawdbot and Moltbot, that has gained rapid popularity as a potentially powerful autonomous AI assistant since launching in November 2025. It has, however, raised global concerns for its potential liability, accountability, and security issues.

The agent may have started as a programming specialist, but by being able to rewrite its own “soul document,” it could adapt, potentially regarding Shambaugh’s rejection of its code as an attack.

Regardless of whether MJ Rathbun is an autonomous agent, the credibility of a self-operating system publishing an attack against someone else undermines traditional mechanisms of online trust. 

Autonomous agents operating without clear attribution or liability may be used to scale character assassination, disinformation, and reputational damage online, as well as to scale fraud and cyberattacks. This makes it increasingly urgent to establish means of verification to secure autonomous AI agents and prevent them from causing harm.